The depiction of East-Prussian refugees on television did not start with Maria Furtwängler. Popular films on flight and expulsion of Germans already emerged in the immediate post-war period after 1945. How did the picture films interpret the events of forced migration and the war? What pictures, what stories did they provide? And what differences – or similarities – occurred in the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR? Based on film clips, the lecture provides answers on these questions and, thus, casts a new light on the German-German film heritage.
Alina Laura Tiews, M. A., researcher at the Research Centre Media History of the Hans-Bredow-Institut, majored in Modern German History, Modern German Literature, and Comparative Literature at Humboldt University, Berlin. Her PhD project focused on the question what role flight and expulsion played in film and television of the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany between 1949 and 1990. Extending beyond the history of migration and the media, Alina Laura Tiews’ research also embraces the fields of cultural memory, politics of memory, and public history.
